Read Online Once a Land Girl by Angela Huth - Free Book Online Page B

struggled out of bed at dawn. And now here she was, feeling twittery again – a feeling that had never assailed her during
her courtship with her husband – because the man next door was taking her to buy some chickens. Daft, she thought.
    They drove slowly through dense fog to a poultry farm some miles from Manchester. Six coops, holding two Rhode Island Reds each, were waiting for them. Johnny piled them into the back of the
van. Prue handed over one of her huge white fivers and was given a handful of change.
    All the way back the stutter of the engine was ameliorated by the hens’ indignant clucking. There was a smell of chicken shit and damp feathers. It was bitterly cold – there was no
heating in the van.
    ‘Much better’, said Prue, ‘than travelling in the Daimler.’ Johnny laughed. It was easy to make him laugh.
    They lugged the coops to the run and set the birds free to shake themselves and scurry about exploring their new territory. They watched them try the water in the drinking trough, begin pecking
at the pristine grass. The fog still hovered low on the ground, giving an ethereal quality to their fat bird-shapes. Johnny put an arm round Prue’s shoulders. But only for a moment.
    For the second time Prue was faced with a dilemma. Again, she would have liked to ask Johnny into a kitchen she felt was hers and make him a cup of tea. But again she was thwarted by the very
thought of Bertha’s jealous guarding of her territory, the outrage she would incur if she entertained a visitor there. ‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ she said. ‘I
wish I could ask you in—’
    ‘Sounds to me as though that housekeeper woman’s tyrannizing you.’ Johnny’s immediate understanding of the situation, and his not requiring any further explanation, was a
relief.
    ‘Not really. I’m just not welcomed. I keep my distance.’
    ‘There’s no reason, though, why you shouldn’t come and have a cup of tea with me.’
    Prue hesitated only for a moment. ‘No,’ she said, with a last look at the birds who were already at home in the run.
    Johnny’s flat was on the first floor of the next-door house – a house identical in proportion and some detail to Prue and Barry’s. They went into a large room that incorporated
an unruly kitchen and a collection of armchairs and tables covered with papers and files. Johnny looked for clean cups. Prue went over to the window and could see that on a clear day there would be
a good view of both gardens and chicken runs.
    ‘You know what?’ Johnny was saying. ‘I’ll be able to look out and see you, morning and night, carrying buckets of chicken feed. Even better, collecting the eggs.
It’ll give a rhythm to the day.’
    ‘I’m sorry – all this chicken business has taken up so much of your time,’ said Prue, ‘kept you from your poetry.’ She turned to look at him putting spoonfuls
of tea into a pot the colour of liver. The china was overlaid with a silvery sheen, like the bloom of grapes in a picture she had once seen by some old master. Identical, it was, to the teapot at
Hallows Farm. Prue felt her heart give a downward beat.
    ‘Don’t worry about that. Nothing takes me from my poetry. It’s in my head all the time.’
    ‘Goodness, is it?’ said Prue. ‘I don’t really understand about poetry.’
    ‘I’ll read you some one day. Here.’ He handed her a cup painted with such delicate roses that the suspicion of a wife occurred to her. Surely he couldn’t have chosen such
prissy china himself. ‘Why don’t you sit on one of my battered armchairs?’
    Prue chose one by the window, a morose but comfortable-looking piece of furniture. On the ledge beside her was the single frivolous object in the room: an empty vodka bottle in which was propped
a child’s windmill on a stem. She wondered whether, when the window was open, a breeze would power the paper arms. She flicked the bottle with a finger.
    ‘Is there something significant here I’m